
( 'toss pT 2 



Book. 







Copyright N?_ 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



The Double Search 
Studies in Atonement and Prayer 



Other Books by the Same Author 

Eli and Sybil Jones : Their Life and 
Work. 

i2mo, 300 pages. (1889) 
Practical Christianity. 

i2mo, 206 pages. (1899) 
A Dynamic Faith. 

i2mo, 105 pages. (1901) 
A Boy's Religion from Memory. 
i6mo, 145 pages. (1902) 
George Fox; An Autobiography. 
i2mo, 2 vols., 584 pages. Illus- 
trated. (1903) 
Social Law in the Spiritual World. 
Studies in Human and Divine 
Inter-relationship. 
i2mo, 272 pages. (1904) 



THE 

DOUBLE SEARCH 

STUDIES IN 
ATONEMENT AND PRAYER 

BY 
RUFUS M. JONES, A.M., Litt.D. 

Professor of Philosophy in Harerford College 



1906. 

PHILADELPHIA, 
THE JOHN C. WINSTON COMPANY, 



LIBRARY of CONGRESS 
Two Cooies Received 

JUL 20 1906 

OLAS! 

' COPY B. 







Copyright, 1906 
By THE JOHN C. WINSTON COMPANY 






I- 

CONTENTS 



PAGE 

Introduction . . . • ... 9 

CHAPTER I 

The Historical and Inward 
Christ . .. . . . . . 21 

CHAPTER II 

The Atonement . . -., . 57 

CHAPTER III 
Prayer . . . : . 89 



Introduction 



"We are always gathered around the Divine 
Centre of our being; and, indeed, if we could 
withdraw from it, our being would at once be 
dissolved away, and we should cease to exist 
at all. But, near as it is to us, often we do 
not direct our eyes to it. When, however, we 
do so direct our gaze, we attain to the end of 
our desires and to the rest of our souls, and 
our song is no more a discord, but, circling 
round our Centre, we pour forth a divinely in- 
spired chorale. And in the choral dance we be- 
hold the source of our life, the fountain of our 
intelligence, the primal good, the root of the 
soul" 

Plotinus, Ennead VI. 



INTRODUCTION. 

THERE is a famous myth in Plato's 
Symposium told to explain the 
origin of love. This myth says that 
primitive man was round, and had four 
hands and four feet, and one head with 
two faces looking opposite ways. He 
could walk on his legs if he liked, But he 
also could roll over and over with great 
speed if he wished to go anywhere very 
fast. 

Because of their fleetness and skill 
these " Round people " were dangerous 
rivals in power to Zeus himself and he 
adopted the plan of weakening them by 
cutting each one of them in two. In re- 
membrance of the original undivided 
9 



io DOUBLE SEARCH 

state each half, ever since unsatisfied and 
alone, seeks eagerly for the other half. 
Each human being is thus a half — a 
tally — and love is the longing to be 
united. The two halves are seeking to 
be joined again in the original whole. 
Such in briefest compass is the myth. 

But as the dialogue advances love is 
traced to a higher source. It is discov- 
ered to be a passion for the eternal, a 
passion which rises in the soul at the 
sight of an object which suggests the 
eternal, from which the soul has come 
into the temporal. The soul is alien 
here and its chief joy in the midst of 
the shows of sense is joy at the sight of 
something which reminds it of its old 
divine home. Thus, again, Plato tells 
us that love has its birth in the division 






INTRODUCTION n 

of what was once a whole. We yearn 
for that from which we have come. 

" Though inland far we be 
Our souls have sight of that immortal 
sea 
That brought us hither." 

We may ignorantly stop at some mid- 
way good and miss the homeward path, 
but our real search, our master passion, 
is for that divine Other to whom we 
belong. So at last Plato poetizes. 

We have discovered through other 
lips, what he could not tell us, that the 
search is a double search. We have 
learned that the Divine Other whom we 
seek is also seeking us. The myth, told 
at the beginning, is more suggestive than 
it seemed. It may perhaps do for a 
parable of the finite and the Infinite, the 



12 DOUBLE SEARCH 

soul and its Father. May they not once 
have been in union ? May not our birth 
in time be a drawing away into individ- 
uality from the Divine whole? And 
then may not the goal of the entire 
drama of personal life be the restoration 
of that union on a higher spiritual level ? 
May it not be, that we are never again 
to fuse the skirts of self and merge into 
a union of oblivion, but rather that we 
are to rise to a love-union in which His 
will becomes our will — a union of con- 
scious cooperation? So at any rate I be- 
lieve. But this little book is not a book 
of speculation. It is not written to urge 
some fond belief. 

We have learned, I say, that life re- 
veals a double search. Man's search for 
God is as plain a fact as his search for 
food. He has* beyond question, blun- 



INTRODUCTION 13 

dered at it and frequently missed the 
trail, but that man in all lands and in all 
times has maintained some kind of 
search for an invisible Companion is a 
momentous fact. 

The other half of the story is, I think, 
still more momentous. It is full of 
pathos and tragedy, but laden with the 
prophecy of final triumph. I have tried 
to tell again this story, surely an old, old 
story, but always needing to be retold 
in the current language and the prevail- 
ing conceptions of the time. The main 
feature of this book is its insistence on 
the facts of experience. Its terms are 
not those of theology, but those of life, 
or if I have used theological words I 
have endeavored to re-vitalize them. I 
shall assume that my readers are familiar 
with the idea of the conjunct life which 



14 DOUBLE SEARCH 

I have expounded at length in a former 
book. 1 It is now well known that " iso- 
lated " personality is impossible. He 
who is to enjoy the rights and privileges 
of personality must be conjunct with oth- 
ers. He must be an organic member in 
a social group, and share himself with 
his fellows, while at the same time he 
receives contributions from them. This 
principle of the conjunct life reaches be- 
yond the finite social fellowship in which 
a man forms and expresses his personal- 
ity. God and man are conjunct. The 
ground for this position will not be gone 
over here. It has been sufficiently pre- 
sented elsewhere. 

I believe, however, that no psycho- 
logical discovery has ever thrown so 

1 " Social Law in the Spiritual World," Phila- 
delphia, 1904. 



INTRODUCTION 15 

much light upon the meaning of atone- 
ment and prayer as this fact of the con- 
junct life does, and I hope that many 
others may come to feel the freshness 
and reality of these deepest religious 
truths as I have felt them. 

la touching these two subjects we are 
touching the very pillars of religion. If 
atonement — God's search for us — 
and prayer — our search for Him — 
are not real, then religion has no per- 
manent ground of reality. But there 
can be no question that our age has wit- 
nessed a serious weakening of faith in 
both these central aspects of religion. 
The doctrine of the atonement does not 
grip men as it did once, and there are 
persons all about us who are perplexed 
about the place and efficacy of prayer. 
It is no frivolous questioning. It is not 



1 6 DOUBLE SEARCH 

the result of a lazy attitude of mind. It 
is stern and serious. There is only one 
way to change this condition. We must 
make men feel again the reality of the 
atonement and the reality of prayer. 
That is the task which lies before those 
of us who believe. The day for dog- 
matic assertion is past. It rolls off most 
minds now as water rolls from oiled silk. 
The truths which march with power are 
the truths which are verified by, and but- 
tressed with, facts. We must, then, 
learn how to carry the laboratory meth- 
od into our religious teaching and ground 
our message in actual reality. 

This slender book is ah attempt to ap- 
proach these two subjects — atonement 
and prayer — in this spirit and by this 
method. We can never get the tele- 
scope or microscope turned upon the ob- 



INTRODUCTION 17 

jects of spiritual experience and we can- 
not use the mathematical method which 
has worked such wonders in the phys- 
ical realm. There will always be some 
who cannot see the evidence. But it is 
worth while to show that these two pil- 
lars of religion do rest — not on air — 
but on experience which can be verified 
and tested; that they rest in fact on the 
elemental basis of life, upon which we 
live our common social life together. 

I trust it will help some to find the 
trail, and that it will convince some per- 
plexed, though honest, readers that how- 
ever their own quest has fared there is 
another search beside their own, — the 
quest of a Divine Companion who spares 
no pain or cost to bring us all into a fel- 
lowship with Him. 

Haverford, Pennsylvania, 
New Year 1906. 



The Historical and the 
Inward Christ 



19 



"All who since Jesus have come into union 
with God have come into union with God through 
Him. And thus it is confirmed in every way 
that, even to the end of time, all wise and intelli- 
gent men must bow themselves reverently before 
this Jesus of Nazareth; and that the more wise, 
intelligent and noble they themselves are, the 
more humbly will they recognize the exceeding 
nobleness of this great and glorious manifestation 
of the Divine Life." 
Fichte's " Way Toward the Blessed Life" p. 391. 

"Christ is the Eternal Humanity in the life 
of the Infinite." 
George A. Gordon's" The Christ of Today" p. 136. 

" The word of God is continually born anew in 
the hearts of holy men." 

Epistle to Diognetus, A. D. 12$. 



20 



THE HISTORICAL AND THE 
INWARD CHRIST. 

THERE was once a widespread fear 
that exact methods of historical 
research would deprive us of that lumi- 
nous divine Figure toward whom the 
world had reverently turned its face for 
more than eighteen centuries. Some 
suspected that our records of His life 
were crowded with myth and legend, 
others believed that the singular story 
which had so profoundly touched the 
world's heart was the creation of high- 
ly wrought enthusiastic disciples. To- 
day, after more than half a century of 
critical sifting and acute probing, this 
luminous Life is more firmly established 

21 



22 DOUBLE SEARCH 

as the central fact of history than ever 
before. 

" That one Face, far from vanish, rather 

grows 
Or decomposes but to recompose 
Becomes my universe which loves and 

knows." 

It is not my purpose at present to retell 
the story, or to point out how much 
criticism has left unshaken. I want 
rather to show how the historical Christ, 
as a revelation of God, fits into a cosmic 
system of evolution and how He is re- 
lated to the Spirit that witnesses with 
our spirits and is the inward life of the 
Saints of all ages and lands. 

I shall not use the language or the 
methods of theology. I shall feel my 
way along the great arteries of human 



THE INWARD CHRIST 23 

experience and try to throw light and 
suggestion rather than to establish some 
final and complete dogma. To be- 
gin at once with the problem before 
us, how shall we think of Christ? Was 
He man? Was He God? Was He 
some miraculous union of two essentially 
unrelated natures? Here are the ques- 
tions which have split the Christian 
world up into camps and which have 
busied schoolmen in all the centuries. 
The difficulty in almost all the theo- 
logical discussions on the subject has 
been that they started with God and 
man isolated, separated, unrelated. No 
true revelation of such a God ever could 
be made through a human life, for di- 
vinity and humanity on this theory are 
conceived as two totally diverse natures. 
Modern psychology and recent studies 



24 DOUBLE SEARCH 

of social life have made us familiar with 
a deeper view of human personality and 
have prepared for a more adequate 
study of Divine personality than was 
possible when the historic creeds were 
formulated. We know that God and 
man are conjunct and that neither can 
be separated absolutely from the other. 
There never has been any doubt of man's 
need of God, but we now know that God 
also needs us and that our lives are mu- 
tually organic. Every clew which leads 
us to God shows Him to us as a spiritual 
and social Being — in no sense solitary 
and self-sufficient. Our own self-con- 
sciousness, our own ideals, our passion for 
the unrealized, imply and involve more 
than an impersonal energy at the heart of 
things. There must be a spiritual ma- 
trix for this living, throbbing, growing 






THE INWARD CHRIST 25 

social organism in which personal life 
is formed. Our own experience carries 
in itself the implication of a genuinely 
spiritual Person at the heart of the uni- 
verse of whom we all partake. The 
spiritual history of the race has forever 
settled this elemental fact, at least for 
all who feel the full significance of life. 
It is not an assumption, it is not a mere 
belief — it is involved in all we feel and 
know and are. But a spiritual, personal 
Being must reveal Himself. An unmani- 
f ested God — unknown and unknowable 
— is no God at all. He would be ab- 
stract and unreal. The least human 
person who poured his life out into those 
about him — who loved and suffered for 
the sake of another — would be a higher 
being than an infinite God shut up in the 
closed circle of His own self life. It is 



26 DOUBLE SEARCH 

a law as old as the morning star that 
one must lose himself to find himself, 
must give to get, must go forth bearing 
precious seed in order to come again 
with sheaves of harvest. The moment 
it is settled that there is a divine Per- 
son as the ultimate reality of the universe, 
it is also settled that He will reveal Him- 
self, that He will put His Life into 
manifold manifestations and that He 
will find His joy in " working all things 
up to better," to use Clement's phrase. 
So long as the processes of evolution 
were confined to the plant and brute there 
could be no revelation of anything but 
force; or at most there could be only 
dawnings of anything higher. The 
forms of life which won in the struggle 
and survived were manifestations of 
power — they hardly implied anything 



THE INWARD CHRIST 27 

more. The tough spine and the strong 
jaw and the sharp claw were all that mat- 
tered. Everything that appeared was 
pushed into existence by a force from be- 
hind. There was no sign or hint of 
freedom, or of life formed under the 
sway of a vision or an ideal. Things 
moved " for a million aeons through the 
vast, waste dawn " toward a goal, but 
the goal was never in sight and it played 
no part in the process. 

John Fiske has, somewhere, denied the 
truth of the proverb that " nature ab- 
hors leaps," and he has given a beauti- 
ful illustration from the cutting of a cone. 
If you pass a plane parallel to the base 
of a cone you cut a circle. If you tilt 
the plane slightly the curve becomes an 
ellipse. The ellipse grows more eccen- 
tric as the tilting increases and finally 



28 DOUBLE SEARCH 

without any warning your plane cuts a 
parabola wkose sides curve off into in- 
finity and never touch ends again. Some 
such mighty leap appears in the process 
of evolution. Up to a certain point life 
evolved by forces working a tergo} 
There is a slight tilt in the system and a 
being appears capable of selecting a goal 
for himself and of acting to attain it, a 
being who could live in some degree for 
a world as it ought to be. 2 

This is what in America we call " the 
great divide " — the watershed which 
determines the streams of a continent. 
As soon as there was a being who could 

1 The term a tergo causation means that what 
happens is produced entirely by the push or the 
pull of forces. There is an exact equation — the 
antecedent determines the consequent. 

2 It is not true, of course, that there is an abso- 
lute " break n in the upward processes of life. 
Even in the lower forms of life there are hints of 



THE INWARD CHRIST 29 

select ideals and live for conscious ends 
a new kind of evolution began. The 
other side of " the divide," evolution 
had been physical, — body, and body 
function had been the goal. This side 
11 the divide," it was spiritual and social, 
and the goal was the evolution of the 
man within man. The things which 
mattered now were love, sacrifice, serv- 
ice, goodwill rather than " tooth and 
claw." Before, nature's goal had been 
along the line of least resistance. Now, 
the line of march set straight against in- 
stinct and along the line of greatest re- 
sistance. There could be advance on 

higher possibilities. There is an elemental strug- 
gle for the life of others which has in it the 
potentiality of love and sacrifice. But there is no 
"sign" on the lower levels — before self-con- 
sciousness dawned — of any capacity for an ideal, 
or of any power to develop by the forecast and 
vision of the goal. 



3 o DOUBLE SEARCH 

this side " the divide," only as the ideal 
became clearer and its sway more coer- 
cive. 

Ever since man was man he has tran- 
scended the actual and lived by vision, 
which means, I think, that finite and in- 
finite are not sundered and that we always 
partake of more than just ourselves. 
Beyond the edge of what we are there is 
always dawning a farther possibility — 
that which we ought to be — the a f route 
compulsion. 1 This is one of God's ways 
of revealing Himself. It is a man's 
chief glory — the glory of the imper- 
fect. 

" Growth came when, looking your last 
on them all 

1 The term a f route compulsion means the com- 
pelling power of an ideal which influences by an 
attraction from in front. 



THE INWARD CHRIST 31 

You turned your eyes inwardly one fine 

day 
And cried with a start — what if we so 

small 
Be greater and grander the while than 

they? 
Are they perfect of lineament, perfect of 

stature ? 
In both, of such lower types are we 
Precisely because of our wider nature; 
For time, theirs — ours, for eternity. 
Today's brief passion limits their range; 
It seethes with the morrow for us and 

more. 
They are perfect — how else? They 

shall never change. 
We are faulty — why not? We have 

time in store." * 

1 Browning's "Old Pictures in Florence." 



32 DOUBLE SEARCH 

This slow unveiling of the ideal, of the 
goal, is, I believe, the divine method of 
making man, and it makes us feel at once 
how nearer than near God is and how all 
the way on and up He is in the very 
tissue and fabric of our lives — no for- 
eign creator who moulded us out of clay 
and left us to run, or to run down, like 
a clock. 

For centuries man won his slender 
spiritual victories, cultivated his rugged 
virtues, sloughed off some marks of ape 
and tiger and formed habits of altruism 
under the influence of ideals which the 
highest personal types of the race re- 
vealed. These types of men were focus 
points, manifesting in some feeble meas- 
ure the ultimate reality and casting out 
hints of the line of march. Sometimes 
they were conscious that they were or- 



THE INWARD CHRIST 33 

gans of a larger Life which used them, 
sometimes they were girded, like Cyrus, 
for a divine mission, though they knew 
not Him whom they served. Thus the 
unbroken revelation of the infinite was 
slowly made, as the age could bear it — 
" God spake at sundry times and in di- 



vers manners." 



Strangely enough the loftiest men of 
the pre-Christian period were always 
vaguely or dimly forecasting a diviner 
life than any ordinary type of man re- 
vealed. The human heart was always 
groping for an unveiling of God which 
would set the race to living on a new 
level. This longing rose among the He- 
brews to a steady passion which burned 
brighter as the clouds in their national 
sky grew blacker. There was a Christ 
ideal centuries before Christ actually 



34 DOUBLE SEARCH 

came in the flesh, though this ideal was 
always deeply tinged and colored by the 
age which gave it birth. But even so, 
it lighted the sky of the future and gave 
many a man heart and hope through long 
periods of dreary pessimism. When lo, 
a tilting of the plane, and the ellipse be- 
comes a parabola with infinite stretch of 
curve! 

44 In fullness of time God sent forth 
His Son." How shall we think of Jesus 
that is called the Christ? Speaking first 
in the terms of evolution, / think of Him 
as the type and goal of the race — the 
new Adam, the spiritual norm and pat- 
tern, the Son of Man who is a revelation 
of what man at his height and full stat- 
ure is meant to be; and this is the way 
Paul thought of Him : " Till we all 
come in the unity of the faith, and of the 



THE INWARD CHRIST 35 

knowledge of the Son of God, unto a 
perfect man, unto the measure of the 
stature of the fullness of Christ." Eph. 
IV, 13. "Whom he did foreknow, he 
did predestinate to be conformed to the 
image of his Son that He might be the 
first born among many brethren." Rom. 
viii, 29. " The expectation of the 
whole creation is waiting for the mani- 
festation of sons of God." Rom. viii, 
19. 

The actual fact is that this Life has, 
profoundly or remotely, touched every 
personal life in Europe for a thousand 
years and has been the goal and standard 
for all aspiring souls. He is the pattern 
in the mount, the a fronte force which 
has drawn the individual and the race 
steadily up to their higher destiny. On 
the spiritual side of " the great divide " 



36 DOUBLE SEARCH 

the goal is in sight and the goal is an 
efficient factor in the process of the evo- 
lution of the man within man. 

But this pattern-aspect of the Christ 
life is only one aspect, and we must not 
raise it out of due balance and perspec- 
tive. Christ is God humanly revealed. 
As soon as we realize that personality is 
always a revelation of the ultimate reality 
of the universe there are no metaphys- 
ical difficulties in the way of an actual 
incarnation of God. It is rather what 
one would expect. There is no other 
conceivable way in which God could be 
revealed to man. If He is a personal 
being; if He is love and tenderness and 
sympathy, and not mere force, only a 
Person can show Him. And if we are 
not kindred in nature, if we have not 
something in common, in a word if we 



THE INWARD CHRIST 37 

are not conjunct, then it is hard to see 
how any revelation of Him could be 
made which would mean anything to us. 
But if we are conjunct, as our own self- 
consciousness implies, then an incarna- 
tion, a complete manifestation in Per- 
sonality, or as Paul puts it, " in the face 
of Jesus Christ,' ' is merely the crown 
and pinnacle of the whole divine process. 
If we are wise we shall not bother our- 
selves too much over the metaphysical 
puzzles which the schoolmen have for- 
mulated. We no longer have the puz- 
zle which was so urgent with them, how 
two natures, pole-wide apart, could be 
united in one Person, for we now know 
that divinity and humanity are not pole- 
wide apart. There is something human 
in God and something divine in man and 
they belong together. 



38 DOUBLE SEARCH 

We shall not, again, be over-anxious 
about the question of nativity. Note the 
grandeur and the simplicity of Paul's text 
about it: " God sent forth His Son 
born of a woman," and there he stops 
with no attempt to furnish details. John 
is equally lofty: "The Word became 
flesh and dwelt among us and we beheld 
His glory." There is no appeal to curi- 
osity. There is no syllable about the 
how. Two synoptic gospels have given 
us a simple story of the nativity which 
has profoundly impressed men in all ages 
and which will always appeal to the deep- 
est instincts in us. But the method of 
Christ's coming, embodied in these two 
accounts, must not be forced. The de- 
vout soul must be free, as both Paul and 
John were free, to leave the how 
wrapped in mystery. That He came out 



THE INWARD CHRIST 39 

of our humanity we shall always believe. 
That He came down out of the highest 
divinity we shall equally believe. That 
He was a babe and increased in wisdom, 
that He learned as He grew, that He 
was tempted and learned through temp- 
tation, are all necessary steps, for there 
is no other path to spiritual Personality 
and He must have been " made perfect 
through sufferings," or He could not 
have been the Captain of salvation. 

Speculations and dogmas have taken 
men's thoughts away from verifiable 
facts. Here was a life which settled 
forever that the ultimate reality is Love. 
He brought into focus, or rather He 
wove into the living tissue of a personal 
life, the qualities of character which be- 
long to an infinitely good being and with 



40 DOUBLE SEARCH 

quiet simplicity He said, "If you see 
me you see the Father." 

I have spoken, perhaps, as though the 
revelation of the human goal, and the 
unveiling of the divine Character were 
two different things. Christ does both, 
but both are one. If you bring a dia- 
mond into the light you occasion a dou- 
ble revelation. There is a revelation of 
the glorious beauty of the jewel. While 
it lay in the dark you never knew its 
possibilities. It was easily mistaken for 
a piece of glass. Now it flashes and 
burns and reveals itself because it has 
found the element for which it was 
meant. But there is also at the same 
time a revelation of the mystery of light. 
You discover now new wonders and new 
glories in light itself. Most objects ab- 
sorb part of its rays and imperfectly 



THE INWARD CHRIST 41 

transmit it to the eye. Here is an ob- 
ject which tells you its real nature. Now 
you see it as it is. So Christ shows us 
at once man and God. In a definite his- 
toric setting and in the limitations of a 
concrete personal life, Christ has unveiled 
the divine nature and taught us to say 
" Father " and He has, in doing that, 
showed us the goal and type of human 
life. The Son of God and the Son of 
Man is one person. 

Now comes our second question how 
shall we think of the inward, the spirit- 
ual, the eternal Christ? The first inter- 
preters, notably Paul and John, early in 
their experience, came to think of Christ 
as a cosmic Being. They read the uni- 
verse in the light of His revelation and 
soon used His name to name the entire 
manifestation of God: " In Him," says 



42 DOUBLE SEARCH 

Paul, " all things consist" " All things 
were made by Him," says John, " and 
without Him was not anything made that 
was made. In Him was life and the life 
was the light of men." John i, 2, 3. 
It was through Him that they first 
learned that God is Spirit, it was through 
Him that their own spiritual life was 
heightened and that they became con- 
scious of a Spirit surging into their own 
souls and they connected this whole wider 
manifestation of God with Him. They 
were right too in doing so. Christ's rev- 
elation of God had produced such spir- 
itual effects upon them that they could 
now find Him within themselves, for 
God's spiritual presence in us is always 
proportioned to our capacity to have Him 
there. And then, too, they were now 
for the first time able to interpret that 



THE INWARD CHRIST 43 

which they felt within themselves. If 
they found God, it was because they had 
found Christ. 

But they were right in a deeper sense. 
If we think of the historical Christ, as I 
have tried to set forth, as the manifesta- 
tion of the Divine and the human in a 
single personal Life then wherever man 
finds God humanly revealed he properly 
names the revelation with the historic 
name. The historic incarnation was no 
final event. It was the supreme instance 
of God and man in a single life — the 
type of continuous Divine-human fellow- 
ship. God's human revelation of Him- 
self is not limited to a single date. As 
Athanasius so boldly said: He became 
man that we might become divine. 
Christ is the prophesy of a new human- 
ity — a humanity penetrated with the life 



44 DOUBLE SEARCH 

and power of God and this continued 
personal manifestation of God through 
men is Christ inwardly and spiritually 
revealed. 

It is a primary truth of Christianity 
that God reaches man directly. No per- 
son is insulated. As ocean floods the 
inlets, as sunlight environs the plant, 
so God enfolds and enwreathes the finite 
spirit. There is this difference, how- 
ever, inlet and plant are penetrated 
whether they will or not. Sea and sun- 
shine crowd themselves in a tergo. Not 
so with God. He can be received only 
through appreciation and conscious ap- 
propriation. He comes only through 
doors that are purposely opened for 
Him. A man may live as near God 
as the bubble is to the ocean and yet not 
find Him. He may be " closer than 



THE INWARD CHRIST 45 

breathing, nearer than hands or feet," 
and still be missed. Historical Chris- 
tianity is dry and formal when it lacks 
the immediate and inward response to 
our Great Companion ; but our spirits are 
trained to know Him, to appreciate Him, 
by the mediation of historical revelation. 
A person's spiritual life is always 
dwarfed when cut apart from history. 
Mysticism is empty unless it is enriched 
by outward and historical revelation. 
The supreme education of the soul comes 
through an intimate acquaintance with 
Jesus Christ of history. One who 
wished to feel the power of beauty would 
go to some supreme master of color and 
form who could exhibit them on canvas 
and not merely lecture about them. One 
who desired to feel the power of harmony 
would go, not to the boy with his har- 



46 DOUBLE SEARCH 

monica, but to the Beethovens or Mo- 
zarts of the race who have revealed what 
an instrument and a human hand can do. 
So he who wishes to realize and practice 
the presence of God must inform himself 
at the source and fount, must come face 
to face with Him who was the highest 
human revelation of God. No one of 
us can interpret his own longings or pur- 
poses until he reads them off in the light 
of some loftier type of personality. That 
person understands himself best who 
grows intimate in fellowship with some 
noble character. And any man who 
wishes to discover the meaning of the in- 
ward voice and to interpret the divine 
breathings which come to human souls 
needs to be informed and illuminated by 
the supreme revelation of the ages. 
With perfect fitness, then, we speak of 



THE INWARD CHRIST 47 

the inward Presence as the spiritual 
Christ. It is the continuation of the 
same revelation which was made under 
the " Syrian blue." 

The procession of the Holy Ghost is 
a continuous revelation and exhibition of 
Christ within men. Whether we use the 
expression Holy Spirit or Christ within 
or spiritual Christ, we mean God opera- 
ting upon human spirits and consciously 
witnessed and appreciated in them. 
" The Lord is the Spirit," cries Paul 
when, with unveiled face, he discovers 
that he is being transformed into His 
image from glory to glory. " Joined to 
the Lord in one Spirit," is another testi- 
mony of the same sort. 

Unfortunately the doctrine of the 
Christ within — " the real presence " — 
has generally been held vaguely, and it 



48 DOUBLE SEARCH 

has easily run into error and even fanat- 
icism. The most common error has 
come from the prevalent view that when 
the Spirit — the inward Christ — comes 
in, the man goes out. It has been sup- 
posed that the finite is suppressed and 
the infinite supplants it and operates in- 
stead of it. This view is not only con- 
trary to Scripture, but also contrary to 
psychological possibility. What really 
happens is that the human spirit through 
its awakened appreciation appropriates 
into its own life the divine Life which 
was always near and was always meant 
for it. The true view has been well put 
by August Sabatier 1 : " It is not enough 
to represent the Spirit of God as com- 
ing to the help of man's spirit, supply- 
ing strength which he lacks, an associate 

1 Sabatier, " Religions of Authority," p. 307. 



THE INWARD CHRIST 49 

or juxtaposed force, a' supernatural aux- 
iliary. Paul's thought has no room 
for such a moral and psychological 
dualism, although popular language eas- 
ily permits it. His thought is quite 
otherwise profound. There is no simple 
addition of divine power and human 
power in the Christian life. The Spirit 
of God identifies itself with the human 
me into which it enters and whose life it 
becomes. If we may so speak, it is in- 
dividualized in the new moral person- 
ality which it creates. A sort of meta- 
morphosis, a transubstantiation, if the 
word may be permitted, takes place in 
the human being. Having been carnal 
it has become spiritual. A " new man " 
arises from the old man by the creative 
act of the spirit of God. Paul calls 
Christians wcv/xaTt/cot, properly speak- 



50 DOUBLE SEARCH 

ing, " the inspired." They are moved 
and guided by the Spirit of God. The 
spirit dwells in them as an immanent vir- 
tue, whose fruits are organically devel- 
oped as those of the flesh. Supernatural 
gifts become natural, or rather, at this 
mystical height, the antithesis created by 
scholastic rationalism becomes meaning- 
less and is obliterated." That is pre- 
cisely my view and if I had not found 
it here so well said I should have put 
the same idea into my own words. 
There are no known limits to the pos- 
sible translation of the Spirit of God — 
the Eternal Christ — into human per- 
sonality. There are all degrees and 
varieties of it as there are all degrees 
and varieties of physical life. One 
stands looking at a century-old oak tree 
and he wonders how this marvelous thing 



THE INWARD CHRIST 51 

ever rose out of the dead earth where 
its roots are. As a matter of fact it did 
not. A tree is largely transformed sun- 
light. There is from first to last an 
earth element to be sure, but the tree is 
forever drawing upon the streams of sun- 
light which flood it and it builds the in- 
tangible light energy into leaf and blos- 
som and fibre until there stands the old 
monarch, actually living on sunshine! 
But the little daisy at its feet, modest 
and delicate, is equally consolidated sun- 
shine, though it pushes its face hardly 
six inches from the soil in which it was 
born. So one spirit differs from another 
spirit in glory. Some have but feebly 
drawn upon the Spiritual Light out of 
which strong lives are builded, others 
have raised the unveiled face to the su- 
preme Light and have translated it into 



52 DOUBLE SEARCH 

a life of spiritual beauty and moral fibre. 
Thus the revelation of God in the flesh 
goes on from age to age. The Christ- 
life propagates itself like all life-types — 
the last Adam proves to be a life-giving 
spirit. He is the first born among many 
brethren. The actual re-creation, the 
genuine identification of self with Christ 
may go on until a man may even say — 
11 Christ lives in me; " " I bear in my 
body the marks of the Lord Jesus; " " It 
has pleased God to reveal His Son in 



me. 



11 See if, for every finger of thy hands, 
There be not found, that day the world 

shall end 
Hundreds of souls, each holding by 

Christ's word, 
That He will grow incorporate with all, 



THE INWARD CHRIST 53 

With me as Pamphylax, with him as 

John, 
Groom for each bride ! Can a mere man 

do this? 
Yet Christ saith, this He lived and died 

to do. 
Call Christ, then, the illimitable God." 
I DO, 



The Atonement 



55 



"Merely to repeat His words is not to con- 
tinue His work; we must reproduce His life, 
passion and death. He desires to live again in 
each one of His disciples in order that He may 
continue to suffer, to bestow Himself, and to 
labor in and through them towards the redemp- 
tion of humanity, until all prodigal and lost 
children be found and brought back to their 
Father's house. Thus it is that, instead of being 
removed far from human history, the life and 
death of Christ once more take their place in 
history, setting forth the law that governs it, 
and, by ceaselessly increasing the power of re- 
demptive sacrifice, transform and govern it, and 
direct it towards its divine end." 

Auguste Sabatier, "The Atonement" p. 134. 



56 



THE ATONEMENT. 

IT is a bold and hazardous task to say 
anything on this subject and I must 
tread with bare, hushed feet, for it is a 
holy realm which we are essaying to en- 
ter. It must be understood from the 
first that I am not going to thresh over ^ 
a heap of theological straw. I am not 
going into that realm of abstract meta- 
physics where one can always prove any 
thesis one may happen to assume at the 
start. I shall keep close to human ex- \y 
perience. The pillars of our faith must 
be planted, not on some artificial con- 
struction of logic, but deep down in the 
actual experience of Life. There are 
external principles of the spiritual Life 
57 



58 DOUBLE SEARCH 

which are as irresistible and compelling 
as the laws of physics or the propositions 
of Euclid, The task of the religious 
teacher is to discover and proclaim these 
elemental truths, but we always find it so 
much easier to fall back on dogma and 
theories which have been spun out of 
men's heads! In the Gospels and in 
Paul's letters the laboratory method pre- 
vails — the writers ground their asser- 
tions on experienced facts, they tell what 
they have found and verified, and they 
always ask their readers to put their 
truths to the test of a personal experi- 
ence like their own. Our modern meth- 
od must be a return to this inward labora- 
tory method. 

No one can carefully study the theories 
of the atonement which have prevailed 
at the various epochs of Christian history 



THE ATONEMENT 59 

without discovering that there has been 
in them a very large mixture of pagan- 
ism. They have been deeply colored by 
mythology and by the crude ideas of 
primitive sacrifice. They start, not with 
the idea of God which Christ has re- 
vealed, but with a capricious sovereign, 
angry at sorely tempted, sinning man, 
and forgiving only after a sacrifice has 
satisfied Him. They treat sin not as a 
fact of experience, but as the result of 
an ancestral fall, which piled up an in- 
finite debt against the race. They all 
move in the realm of law rather than in 
the domain of personality. They are 
all, more or less, vitiated by abstract and 
mathematical reasoning, while sin and 
salvation are always affairs of the in- 
ward life, and are of all things personal 
and concrete. The first step to a coer- 






60 DOUBLE SEARCH 

cive conception of the atonement is to get 
out of the realm of legal phrases into 
the region of personality. 

Sin is no abstract dogma. It is not a 
debt which somebody can pay and so 
wash off the slate. Sin is a fact within 
our lives. It is a condition of heart and 
will. There is no sin apart from a sin- 
ner. Wherever sin exists there is a con- 
scious deviation from a standard — a sag 
of the nature, and it produces an effect 
upon the entire personality. The per- 
son who sins disobeys a sense of right. 
He falls below his vision of the good. 
He sees a path, but he does not walk in 
it. He hears a voice, but he says " no " 
instead of " yes." He is aware of a 
higher self which makes its appeal, but 
he lets the low r er have the reins. There 
is no description of sin anywhere to com- 



THE ATONEMENT 61 

pare with the powerful narrative out of 
the actual life of the Apostle Paul, found 
in Romans VII : 9-25. The thing which 
moves us as we read it is the picture here 
drawn of our own state. A lower na- 
ture dominates us and spoils our life. 
" What I would I do not; what I would 
not that I do." 

The most solemn fact of sin is its ac- 
cumulation of consequences in the life of 
the person. Each sin tends to produce 
a set of the nature. It weaves a mesh 
of habit. It makes toward a dominion, 
or as Paul calls it, a law of sin in the 
man — " Wretched Man," who sees a 
shining possible life, but stays below, 
chained to a body of sin. Sin, real sin, 
and not the fictitious abstraction which 
figures in theories, is a condition of per- 
sonal will and action much more than a 



62 DOUBLE SEARCH 

debt to be paid or forgiven. The prob- 
lem is far deeper. The only possible 
remedy here is to get a new man, a 
transformation of personality. Relief 
from penalty will not stead. Forgive- 
ness is not enough. Relief from pen- 
alty, forgiveness alone, might spoil us, 
and make us think too lightly of our ovm 
sin. No, it is not a judicial relief which 
our panting, sin-defeated hearts cry out 
for. We want more than the knowl- 
edge that the past is covered and will 
not count on the books against us. We 
want blackness replaced by whiteness, we 
want weakness replaced by power, we 
want to experience a new set of our in- 
nermost nature which will make us more 
than conquerors. We seek deliverance 
not from penalty and debt — but deliv- 



THE ATONEMENT 63 

erance from the life of sin into a life of 
holy will. 

There is still another aspect to sin 
which must be considered before we can 
fully appreciate the way of salvation 
which the Gospel reveals. Sin not only 
spoils the sinner's life and drags him 
into slavery. It separates him from God. 
It opens a chasm between him and his 
heavenly Father, or to vary the figure 
it casts a shadow on God's face. God 
seems far away and stern. The sense 
of warmth and tenderness vanishes. 
The sinner can see God only through 
the veil of his sins. This is a universal 
experience. The same thing happens in 
our relations with men. As soon as we 
have injured a person, treated him un- 
fairly, played him false, a chasm opens 
between our life and his. We transfer 



64 DOUBLE SEARCH 

our changed attitude to him. We dislike 
to meet him. We have no comfort in 
his presence. We interpret all his ac- 
tions through the shadow which our deed 
has created. Our sense of wrong-doing 
makes us afraid of the person wronged. 
The conduct of little children offers 
a good illustration of this subjective ef- 
fect of sin, because in them one catches 
the attitude at its primitive stage before 
reflection colors it. Some little child 
has disobeyed his father and discovers, 
perhaps for the first time, that he has 
11 something inside which he cannot do 
what he wants to with," as a little boy 
said. When he begins to think of meet- 
ing his father he grows uncomfortable. 
It is not punishment he is afraid of, he 
has no anticipation of that. He is con- 
scious of wrong doing and it has made 



THE ATONEMENT 65 

a chasm between himself and his father. 
He reads his father's attitude now in the 
shadow of his deed. He has no joy or 
confidence in meeting him. Something 
strange has come between them. 

What does the little fellow do? He 
instinctively feels the need of some sac- 
rifice. He must soften his father by 
giving him something. He breaks open 
his bank and brings his father his pen- 
nies, or he brings in his hand the most 
precious plaything he owns, and acts out 
his troubled inward condition. He 
wants the gap closed and he feels that it 
will cost something to get it closed. 1 

1 1 am aware that this feature of child life 
will seem to some of my readers to be overdrawn. 
Some Mothers say that no such tendency was 
observed in their own children. That is quite 
likely. All children do not express their subtle 
^nd complex emotions in the same way. I do 

5 



66 DOUBLE SEARCH 

That is human nature. That feeling is 
deep-rooted in man wherever he is found. 
He is conscious that sin separates and 
he feels that something costly and pre- 
cious is required to close the chasm. Sac- 
rifice is one of the deepest and most per- 
manent facts of the budding spiritual 
life. Its origin is far back in history. 
The tattered papyrus, the fragment of 
baked clay, the pictorial inscription of 
the most primitive sort, all bear witness 
to this immemorial custom. It is as old 
as smiling or weeping, as hard to trace 
to a beginning as loving or hating. It 
is bound up with man's sense of guilt, 

not mean to imply that every child expresses a 
need of sacrifice when he does wrong. But care- 
ful observers of children have frequently noted 
the facts which I have emphasized in the text, 
and I have often met them in my own experience 
with children. 



THE ATONEMENT 6% 

and was born when conscience was born. 
Dark and fantastic are many of the chap- 
ters of the long story of man's efforts 
to square the account. Priests have 
seized upon this instinctive tendency and 
have twisted it into abnormal shapes, but 
they did not create it — it is elemental. 
The idea of an angry God who must be 
appeased and satisfied was born with 
this consciousness of guilt, it is a natural 
product of the shadow of human sin. 1 

1 It has been shown by Robertson Smith and 
others that the Hebrews thought of sacrifice not 
as a gift to appease Jehovah but as a sharing of 
a common meal with him. Such a lofty view of 
sacrifice is surely not primitive. When sacrifice 
had come to be thought of, as of a common meal, 
it had already been purified and transformed by 
centuries of development and the heightening 
presupposes a series of unnamed prophets before 
the list of great revealers whose names we know. 
In the earliest stages religion is only very slightly 
ethical. The moralization of religion is one of 
the most tremendous facts of human history. 



68 DOUBLE SEARCH 

The historic theories of the atonement, 
inherited from the Roman church, were 
all formulated under the sway of this 
idea. 

The tw'O fundamental aspects of sin, 
then, are ( I ) its inward moral effect 
upon the soul, its enslaving power over 
the sinner, and (2) its tendency to open 
a chasm between God and man, to make 
God appear full of wrath. How does 
Christ meet this human situation? What 
is the heart of the Gospel? First of all, 
Christ reverses the entire pagan attitude. 
He reveals God as a Father whose very 
inherent nature is love and tenderness and 
forgiveness. In place of a sovereign de- 
manding justice, He shows an infinite 
Lover. We must either give up the par- 
able of the Prodigal Son, or accept this 
view of God. But this parable fits the 



THE ATONEMENT 69 

entire Gospel. John was only uttering 
what Jesus Christ taught by every act 
of His life and what He exhibited su- 
premely on His cross, when He said 
" God is Love." To surrender this 
truth, and to start with the assumption 
of a God who must be appeased, or rec- 
onciled or changed in attitude is to sur- 
render the heart of the Gospel, and to 
weave the shining threads of our mes- 
sage of salvation in with the black 
threads of a pagan warp. He who came 
to show us the Father, has unmistakably 
showed Him full of love, not only for 
the saint, for the actual son; but also 
for the sinner, the potential son. Either 
God is Love, or we must conclude that 
Christ has not revealed Him as He is. 

But the great difficulty is that so many 
fail to see what Divine Love and human 



7 o DOUBLE SEARCH 

sin involve when they come together. It 
has superficially been assumed that if 
God is a loving Father He will lightly 
overlook sin and cannot be hard upon 
the sinner. They catch at a soft view of 
sin and patch up a rose water theory of 
its cure. This soft view has appealed to 
those who like an easy religion, and it 
has often driven the evangelical Chris- 
tian to an opposite extreme, which finds 
no support in the Gospel. To arrive at 
a deeper view we must go back to Christ 
and go down into the deeps of love as 
we know it in actual human life. 

True love is never weak and thin, and 
unconcerned about the character of the 
beloved. The father does not " lay 
aside " his love when he punishes his 
erring boy, and keeps him impressed with 
the reality of moral distinctions. It is 



THE ATONEMENT 71 

the father's intense love which wields the 
rod. All true corrections and chastise- 
ments flow out of love. Even Dante 
knew this, when he wrote on the door 
of Hell, " Love was my maker." It is 
an ignorant and mushy love that cannot 
rise above kisses and sugar plums, and 
it is extremely superficial to set up a 
schism between love and justice. 

But that is not all. Love always in- 
volves vicarious suffering. Love is an 
organic principle. It carries with it the 
necessity of sharing life with other per- 
sons, and in a world of imperfect per- 
sons, it means not only sharing gains and 
triumphs, it means, too, sharing losses 
and defeats. No man can sin in a sin- 
tight compartment. Suffer for his own 
sin the sinner assuredly will. But he 
does not stop there. Many innocent 



72 DOUBLE SEARCH 

persons will suffer for it, too. This is 
one of the tragic aspects of life which has 
baffled many a lone sufferer like Job. 
Those who are nearest and closest to the 
sufferer will suffer most, but his sin has 
endless possibilities of causing suffering 
upon persons far remote in time and 
space. That ancient figure of the rip- 
ples from the little pebble, which sends 
rings to the farthest shores of the sea, 
is not overdrawn. Not one of us can 
estimate the havoc of his sin, or forecast 
the trail of suffering which it will leave 
behind it. So long as life remains or- 
ganic there will be vicarious suffering. 

But that is only one side of life. Ho- 
liness also involves a like suffering. 
There are no holiness-tight compart- 
ments. No man caa be holy unto him- 
self. Just as far as he has any rag of 



THE ATONEMENT 73 

holiness he must share it — he must feel 
himself a debtor to others who lack — 
he must take up the task of making oth- 
ers holy. That costs something. 

You cannot command or compel people 
into holiness, you cannot increase their 
spiritual stature one cubit by any kind 
of force or compulsion. You can do it 
only by sharing your life with them, by 
making them feel your goodness, by your 
love and sacrifice for them. When a 
martyr dies for some truth, men sudden- 
ly discover for the first time how much 
it is worth and they eagerly pursue it over 
all obstacles. In spiritual things we 
always make our appeal to the cost of 
the truth or the principle. Think of the 
blood which has been shed for freedom 
of conscience ! Remember what a price 
has been paid in blood for the principle 



74 DOUBLE SEARCH 

of democracy! Thus we speak of all 
the privileges of life. They are ours 
because somebody has felt that they were 
worth the cost, because somebody has 
died that we might freely have them. 
It is the tragedy of human life that we 
must suffer through the sin of others, 
and we must suffer also if we would 
carry goodness or holiness into other 
lives. Every bit of goodness which ever 
prevails anywhere in this world has cost 
somebody something. 

This principle of vicarious suffering is 
no late arrival; it appears at every scale 
of life, heightening as we go up — be- 
coming less blind and more voluntary. 
It was a central truth of Christ's revela- 
tion that this principle does not stop with 
man; it goes on up to the top of the 
spiritual scale. It finds its complete and 



THE ATONEMENT 75 

final expression in God Himself. God's 
life and our lives are bound together, as 
a vine with branches, as a body with 
members. So corporate are we that no 
one can give a cup of cold water to the 
least person in the world without giving 
it to Him! But He is perfect and we 
are imperfect, He is holy and we sin. 
If the wayward boy, who wastes his life, 
pains the heart of his mother whose life 
is wrapped up in him, can we fling our 
lives away and not make our Heavenly 
Father suffer? The cross is the answer. 
He has undertaken to make Sons of God 
out of such creatures as we are, to take 
us out of the pit and the miry clay, to 
put spiritual songs in our mouths and 
write His own name on our foreheads, 
will that cost Him nothing ? Again, the 
cross is the answer. 



76 DOUBLE SEARCH 

Here we discover — it is the main 
miracle of the Gospel — that the original 
movement to bridge the chasm comes 
from the Divine side. What man hoped 
to do, but could not, with his bleating 
lamb and timid dove, God Himself has 
done. He has reached across the chasm, 
taking on Himself the sacrifice and cost, 
to show the sinner that the only obstruc- 
tion to peace and reconciliation is in the 
sinner himself. " This is love, not that 
we loved Him, but that He loved us," 
and this is sacrifice, not that we give our 
bulls and goats to please Him, but that 
He gives Himself to draw us. 

Browning puts it all in a line: 

" Thou needs must love me who have 
died for thee." 

This is the key to Paul's great message 



THE ATONEMENT 77 

which won the Roman Empire. It was 
not a new philosophy. It was the irre- 
sistible appeal to love, exhibited in Christ 
crucified. " He loved me and gave 
Himself for me; " " We are more than 
conquerors through Him that loved us." 
" I am persuaded that neither death, nor 
life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor 
powers, nor things present, nor things to 
come, nor height, nor depth, nor any 
other created thing, shall be able to sepa- 
rate us from the love of God, which is 
in Christ Jesus our Lord." Sacrificing 
love, the Divine Heart suffering over sin, 
God Himself taking up the infinite bur- 
den and cost of raising men like us into 
sons of God like Himself; this is the 
revelation in the face of Jesus Christ. 
The heart that can stand that untouched 
can stand anything. 



78 DOUBLE SEARCH 

The power unto salvation, the dynamic 
of the Gospel is in the cross, which ex- 
hibits in temporal setting the eternal fact, 
that God suffers over sin, that He takes 
upon Himself the cost of winning sons 
to glory and that His love reaches out to 
the most sin-scarred wanderer, who 
clutches the swine husks in his lean 
hands. 

But the appeal of love and sacrifice is 
not the whole of the truth which this 
word atonement covers. We have been 
seeing, in some feeble way, how God in 
Christ enters into human life, identifies 
Himself with us, and reveals the energy 
of Grace. But we cannot stop with 
" what has been done for us without us." 
Sin, as has been already said, is an affair 
of personal choice — it is a condition of 
inward life. It is not an abstract entity, 



THE ATONEMENT 79 

in a metaphysical realm. It is the atti- 
tude of heart and will in a living, throb- 
bing person who cannot get free from the 
lower nature in himself. So too with 
Salvation. It cannot be a transaction m 
some realm foreign to the individual him- 
self. It is not a plan, or scheme. It is 
an actual deliverance, a new creation. 
It is nothing short of a redeemed inward 
nature. Such a change cannot be 
wrought without the man himself. It 
cannot come by a tergo compulsion. It 
must be by a positive winning of the will. 
A dynamic faith in the man must cooper- 
ate with that energy from God. Some- 
thing comes down from above, but some- 
thing must also go up from below. Paul, 
who has given the most vital interpreta- 
tion of both sides of the truth of re- 
demption — the objective and the sub- 



80 DOUBLE SEARCH 

jective — that has ever been expressed, 
uses the word " faith " to name the hu- 
man part of the process. 

Faith, in Paul's sense of it, means an 
identification of ourselves with Christ, by 
which we re-live His life. As He iden- 
tified Himself with sinning humanity, so, 
by the attraction of his love, we identify 
ourselves with His victorious Life. We 
go down into death with Him — a death 
to sin and the old self — and we rise 
with Him into newness of life, to live 
henceforth unto Him who loved us. 

There is no easy road out of a nature 
of sin into a holy nature. It is vain to 
try and patch up a scheme which will 
relieve us of our share of the tragedy of 
sin — or to put it another way, the tra- 
vail for the birth of the sons of God. 
The Redeemer suffers, but He does not 



THE ATONEMENT 81 

suffer in our stead — He suffers in our 
behalf, [infy not am]. He makes His 
appeal of love to us to share His life 
as He shares ours. It is Paul's goal 
— a flying goal, surely — " to know Him 
and the power of His resurrection, and 
the fellowship of His sufferings, being 
made conformable unto His death." 
The boldest word which comes from his 
pen was : " I rejoice in my sufferings on 
your behalf; and fill up that which is 
lacking of the afflictions of Christ in my 
flesh, for His body's sake, which is the 
Church." (Col. i % 24.) It is not re- 
peating His words that saves us, it is re- 
living His life, co-dying, and co-rising 
with Him, and entering with a radiant 
joy, caught from His face, into the com- 
mon task of redeeming a world of sin to 
a kingdom of love and holiness. 



82 DOUBLE SEARCH 

In that great book of spiritual symbol- 
ism — -the Book of Revelation — those 
who overcome are builded, as pillars, into 
the Temple of God, and He writes His 
new name upon them. The new name 
is Redeemer. Those who have come up 
through great tribulation and have 
washed their robes in the blood of the 
Lamb are builded in as a permanent part 
of the Temple, where God reveals Him- 
self, and they share with Him in the 
great redeeming work of the ages. 

Whatever it has meant in the past, in 
the ages when the races were sloughing 
off their paganism, in the future the 
atonement must be vital and dynamic. 
It must be put in language which grips 
the heart, convinces the mind, and car- 
ries the will. It will name for us the 
Divine-human travail for a redeemed hu- 



THE ATONEMENT 83 

manity. It will cease to signify a way 
by which God was appeased and it will 
come to express, as it did in the apostolic 
days, the identification of God with us in 
the person of Christ, and the identifica- 
tion, by the power of His love, of our- 
selves with Him. We shall pass from 
the terms which were inherited from 
magic and ancient sacerdotal rites and 
we shall use instead the language of our 
riper experience. We shall abandon 
illustrations drawn from law courts and 
judicial decisions and we shall rise to 
conceptions which fit the actual facts of 
inward, personal experience where higher 
and lower natures contend for the mas- 
tery. The drama will not be in some 
foreign realm, apart from human con- 
sciousness, it will rise in our thought into 
the supreme drama of history — the 



84 DOUBLE SEARCH 

tragedy of the spiritual universe — the 
battle of holiness with sin — the blood 
and tears which tell the cost of sin and 
create in response a passion for the Di- 
vine Lover who is our Father. It will 
stop at no fictitious righteousness which 
is counted unto us, as though it were 
ours. We shall demand an actual re- 
demption of the entire self which has be- 
come righteous, because it lives, in 
Christ's power, the life which He lived. 
We shall learn to tell the story in such 
a way that the cross will not seem to be 
brought in, as an afterthought, to repair 
the damage wrought by an unforeseen 
catastrophe. It will stand as the consum- 
mation of an elemental spiritual move- 
ment and it will be organic with the en- 
tire process of the making of men. 
With charm and power, Ruskin has told 



THE ATONEMENT 85 

how the black dirt that soils the city 
pavement is composed of four elements 
which make, when they follow the law of 
their nature, the sapphire, the opal, the 
diamond and the dew drop. The glory 
and splendor do not appear in the black 
dirt, but the possibilities are there. 
When the law of the nature of these ele- 
ments has full sweep the glory comes 
out. Man was not meant for a sinner, 
and to live a dark, chaotic life. There 
are far other possibilities in him. He is 
a potential child of God. The full na- 
ture has broken forth in one life and 
men beheld its glory. " To as many a9 
receive Him, to them gives He power to 
become the sons of God." 



Prayei 



8.7 



By prayer, I do not mean any bodily exercise 
of the outward man; but the going forth of the 
spirit of Life towards the Fountain of Life, for 
fullness and satisfaction: The natural tendency 
of the poor, rent, derived spirit, towards the 
Fountain of Spirits. 

Isaac Penington. 

" I, that still pray at morning 1 and at eve, 
Loving those roots that feed us from the past, 
And prizing more than Plato things I learned 
At that best Academe, a mother's knee, 
Thrice in my life perhaps have truly prayed, 
Thrice, stirred below my conscious self, have felt 
That perfect disenthralment which is God." 

Lowell's " Cathedral" 

"The aim of prayer is to attain to the habit 
of goodness, so as no longer merely to have the 
things that are good, but rather to be good." 
Clement of Alexandria. 



PRAYER. 

WE come now to the human search 
for a divine fellowship and 
companionship. Its complete history 
would be the whole story of religion. 
In this little book I shall speak only of 
certain definite human ways of seeking 
fellowship with God, namely, of prayer. 
Prayer is an extraordinary act. The 
eyes close, the face lights up, the body 
is moved with feeling, and (it may be in 
the presence of a multitude) the person 
praying talks in perfect confidence with 
somebody, invisible and intangible, and 
who articulates no single word of re- 
sponse. It is astonishing. And yet it is 
8g 



9 o DOUBLE SEARCH 

a human custom as old as marriage, as 
ancient as grave-making, older than any 
city on the globe. There is no human 
activity which so stubbornly resists being 
reduced to a bread and butter basis. 
Men have tried to explain the origin of 
prayer by the straits of physical hunger, 
but it will no more fit into utilitarian sys- 
tems than joy over beauty will. It is an 
elemental and unique attitude of the soul 
and it will not be " explained " until we 
fathom the origin of the soul itself ! 

But is not the advance of science mak- 
ing prayer impossible? In unscientific 
ages the universe presented no rigid or- 
der. It was easy to believe that the 
ordinary course of material processes 
might be altered or reversed. The 
world was conceived as full of invisible 
beings who could affect the course of 



PRAYER 91 

events at will, while above all, there was 
a Being who might interfere with things 
at any moment, in any way. 

Our world to-day is not so conceived. 
Our universe is organized and linked. 
Every event is caused. Caprice is ban- 
ished. There is no such thing in the 
physical world as an uncaused event. If 
we met a person who told us that he had 
seen a train of cars drawn along with no 
couplings and held together by the mu- 
tual affection of the passengers in the 
different cars we should know that he was 
an escaped lunatic and we should go on 
pinning our faith to couplings as before. 
Even the weather is no more capricious 
than the course of a planet in space. 
Every change of wind and the course of 
every flying cloud is determined by pre- 
vious conditions. Complex these combi- 



92 DOUBLE SEARCH 

nations of circumstances certainly are, 
but if the weather man could get data 
enough he could foretell the storm, the 
rain, the drought exactly as well as the 
astronomer can foretell the eclipse. 
There is no little demon, there is no tall, 
bright angel, who holds back the shower 
or who pushes the cloud before him; no 
being, good or bad, who will capriciously 
alter the march of molecules because it 
suits our fancy to ask that the chain of 
causes be interrupted. What is true of 
the weather is true in every physical 
realm. Our universe has no caprice in 
it. Every thing is linked, and the 
forked lightning never consults our pref- 
erences, nor do cyclones travel exclusive- 
ly where bad men live. As of old the 
rain falls on just and unjust alike, on 
saint and sinner. The knowledge of this 



PRAYER 93 

iron situation has had a desolating effect 
upon many minds. The heavens have 
become as brass and the earth bars of 
iron. To ask for the interruption of the 
march of atoms seems to the scientific 
thinker the absurdest of delusions and 
all fanes of prayer appear fruitless. 
Others resort to the faith that there are 
" gaps " in the causal system and that in 
these unorganized regions — the do- 
mains so far unexplored — there are 
realms for miracle and divine wonder. 
The supernatural, on this theory is to be 
found out beyond the region of the 
" natural," and forcing itself through 
the " gaps." Those of this faith are 
filled with dread as they see the so called 
" gaps " closing, somewhat as the pious 
Greek dreaded to see Olympus climbed. 
There are still others who evade the 



DOUBLE SEARCH 

difficult}' by holding that God has made 
the universe, is the Author of its " laws," 
is Omnipotent and therefore can change 
them at Will, or can admit exceptions in 
their operation. This view is well illus- 
trated in the faith of George Miiller, 
who writes : " When I lose such a thing 
as a key, I ask the Lord to direct me to 
it, and I look for an answer; when a per- 
son with whom I have made an appoint- 
ment does not come, according to the 
fixed time, and I begin to be inconven- 
ienced by it, I ask the Lord to be pleased 
to hasten him to me, and I look for an 
answer; when I do not understand a pas- 
sage of the word of God, I lift up my 
heart to the Lord that He would be 
pleased by His Holy Spirit to instruct 
me, and I expect to be taught/' 

This view takes us back once more 



PRAYER 95 

into a world of caprice. It introduces 
a world in which almost anything may 
happen. We can no longer calculate 
upon anything with assurance. Even 
our speed, as we walk, is regulated by 
the capricious wish of our friends. But 
that is not all, it is a low, crude view 
of God — a Being off above the world 
who makes " laws " like a modern legis- 
lator and again changes them to meet a 
new situation, who is after all only a big- 
ger man in the sky busily moving and 
shifting the scenes of the time-drama as 
requests reach him. 

None of these positions is tenable. 
The first is not, for prayer is a necessity 
to full life, and the other two are not, 
because they do not fairly face the facts 
which are forced upon those who accept 
scientific methods of search and of 



96 DOUBLE SEARCH 

thought. This physical universe is a 
stubborn affair. It is not loose and ad- 
justable, and worked, for our private 
convenience, by wires or strings at a cen- 
tral station. It is a world of order, a 
realm of discipline. It is our business 
to discover a possible line of march in 
the world as it is, to find how to triumph 
over obstacles and difficulty, if we meet 
them — not to resort to " shun pikes " 
or cries for " exception in our particular 
case." 

The real difficulty is that our genera- 
tion has been conceiving of prayer on 
too low a plane. Faith is not endan- 
gered by the advance of science. It is 
endangered by the stagnation of reli- v 
gious conceptions. If religion halts at 
some primitive level and science marches 
on to new conquests of course there will 



PRAYER 97 

be difficulty. But let us not fetter sci- 
ence, let us rather promote religion. 
We need to rise to a truer view of God 
and to a loftier idea of prayer. It is 
another case of " leveling up." On the 
higher religious plane no collision be- 
tween prayer and science will be found. 
There will be no sealing of the lips in 
the presence of the discovery that all is 
law. 

The prayer which science has affected 
is the spurious kind of prayer, which can 
be reduced to a utilitarian, " bread and 
butter," basis. Most enlightened per- 
sons now are shocked to hear " patri- 
otic " ministers asking God to direct the 
bullets of their country's army so as to 
kill their enemies in battle, and we all 
hesitate to use prayer for the attainment 
of low, selfish ends, but we need to 



98 DOUBLE SEARCH 

cleanse our sight still farther and rise 
above the conception of prayer as an easy 
means to a desired end. 

It is a fact that there are valid prayer 
effects and there is plenty of experimental 
evidence to prove the energy of prayer. 
It is literally true that " more things are 
wrought by prayer than this world 
dreams of." There are no assignable 
bounds to the effects upon mind and 
body of the prayer of living faith. 
Some of those particular cases of George 
Miiller's are quite within the range of 
experience. The prayer for the lost key 
may well produce a heightened energy of 
consciousness which pushes open a door 
into a deeper stratum of memory, and 
the man rises from his knees and goes 
to the spot where the key was put. So 
too with the passage of Scripture. No 



PRAYER 99 

doubt many a man has come back from 
his closet where the turmoil of life was 
hushed and where all the inward currents 
set toward God, many of us I say, come 
back with a new energy and with cleared 
vision and we can grasp what before 
eluded us, we can see farther into the 
spiritual meaning of any of God's reve- 
lations. There is perhaps never a sweep 
of the soul out into the wider regions of 
the spiritual world which does not 
heighten the powers of the person who 
experiences it. Profound changes in 
physical condition, almost as profound 
as the stigmata of St. Francis, have in 
our own times followed the prayer of 
faith and many of us in our daily prob- 
lems and perplexities have seen the light 
break through, as we prayed, and shine 
out, like a search light, on some plain 

LOFC. 



ioo DOUBLE SEARCH 

path of duty or of service. There is un- 
mistakable evidence of incoming energy 
from beyond the margin of what we usu- 
ally call " ourselves." 

We have not to do with a God who is 
" off there " above the sky, who can deal 
with us only through " the violation of 
physical law." We have instead a God 
" in whom we live and move and are," 
whose Being opens into ours, and ours 
into His, who is the very Life of our 
lives, the matrix of our personality; and 
there is no separation between us unless 
we make it ourselves. No man, scien- 
tist or layman, knows where the curve is 
to be drawn about the personal " self." 
No man can say with authority that the 
circulation of Divine currents into the 
soul's inward life is impossible. On 
the contrary, Energy does come in. In 



PRAYER 101 

our highest moments we find ourselves in 
contact with wider spiritual Life than 
belongs to our normal me. 

But true prayer is something higher. 
It is immediate spiritual fellowship. 
Even if science could demonstrate that 
prayer could never effect any kind of 
utilitarian results, still prayer on its loft- 
ier side would remain untouched, and 
persons of spiritual reach would go on 
praying as before. If we could say 
nothing more we could at least affirm 
that prayer, like faith, is itself the vic- 
tory. The seeking is the finding. The 
wrestling is the blessing. It is no more 
a means to something else than love is. 
It is an end in itself. It is its own ex- 
cuse for being. It is a kind of first fruit 
of the mystical nature of personality* 
The edge of the self is always touching 



102 DOUBLE SEARCH 

a circle of life beyond itself to which it 
responds. The human heart is sensitive 
to God as the retina is to light waves. 
The soul possesses a native yearning for 
intercourse and companionship which 
takes it to God as naturally as the home 
instinct of the pigeon takes it to the place 
of its birth. There is in every normal 
soul a spontaneous outreach, a free play 
of spirit which gives it onward yearning 
of unstilled desire. 

It is no mere subjective instinct — no 
blind outreach. If it met no response, 
no answ r er, it would soon be weeded out 
of the race. It would shrivel like the 
functionless organ. We could not long 
continue to pray in faith if we lost the 
assurance that there is a Person who 
cares, and who actually corresponds with 
us. Prayer has stood the test of expe- 



PRAYER 103 

rience. In fact the very desire to pray 
is in itself prophetic of a heavenly 
Friend. A subjective need always car- 
ries an implication of an objective stimu- 
lus which has provoked the need. There 
is no hunger, as Fiske has well shown, 
for anything not tasted, there is no search 
for anything which is not in the environ- 
ment, for the environment has always 
produced the appetite. So this native 
need of the soul rose out of the divine 
origin of the soul, and it has steadily 
verified itself as a safe guide to reality. 
What is at first a vague life-activ- 
ity and spontaneous outreach of inward 
energy — a feeling after companion- 
ship — remains in many persons vague 
to the end. But in others it frequently 
rises to a definite consciousness of a per- 
sonal Presence and there comes back into 



104 DOUBLE SEARCH 

the soul a compelling evidence of a real 
Other Self who meets all the Soul's need. 
For such persons prayer is the way to 
fullness of life. It is as natural as 
breathing. It is as normal an operation 
as appreciation of beauty, or the pursuit 
of truth. The soul is made that way, 
and as long as men are made with mys- 
tical deeps within, unsatisfied with the 
finite and incomplete, they will pray and 
be refreshed. 

Vague and formless, in some degree, 
communion would always be, I think, 
apart from the personal manifestation of 
God in Jesus Christ. As soon as God 
is known as Father, as soon as we turn 
to Him as identical in being with our 
own humanity, as suffering with us and 
loving us even in our imperfection, this 
communion grows defined and becomes 



PRAYER 105 

actual social fellowship which is prayer 
at its best. Paul's great prayers of fel- 
lowship rise to the God and Father of 
our Lord Jesus Christ, the God whom 
we know, because He has been humanly 
revealed in a way that fits our life. We 
turn to Him as the completeness and re- 
ality of all we want to be, the other Self 
whom we have always sought. The 
vague impulse to reach beyond our iso- 
lated and solitary self gives place to an 
actual experience of relationship with a 
personal Friend and Companion and this 
experience may become, and often does 
become, the loftiest and most joyous ac- 
tivity of life. The soul is never at its 
best until it enjoys God, and prays out 
of sheer love. Nobody who has learned 
to pray in this deeper way and whose 
prayer is a prayer of communion and fel- 



106 DOUBLE SEARCH 

lowship, wants logical argument for the 
existence of God. Such a want implies 
a fall from a higher to a lower level. 
It is like a demand for a proof of the 
beauty one feels, or an evidence of love 
other than the evidence of its experience. 
Prayer will always rise or fall with 
the quality of one's faith, like the mer- 
cury in the tube which feels at once the 
change of pressure in the atmosphere. 
It is only out of live faith that a living 
prayer springs. When a man's praying 
sinks into words, words, words, it means 
that he is trying to get along with a dead 
conception of God. The circuit no 
longer closes. He cannot heighten his 
prayer by raising his voice. What he 
needs is a new revelation of the reality 
of God. He needs to have the fresh 
sap of living faith in God push off the 






PRAYER 107 

dead leaves of an outgrown belief, so 
that once more prayer shall break forth 
as naturally as buds in spring. 

The conception of God as a lonely 
Sovereign, complete in Himself and in- 
finitely separated from us " poor worms 
of the dust," grasshoppers chirping our 
brief hour in the sun, is in the main a 
dead notion. Prayer to such a God 
would not be easy with our modern ideas 
of the universe. It would be as difficult 
to believe in its efficiency as it would be 
to believe in the miracle of transubstan- 
tiation in bread and wine. But that 
whole conception is being supplanted by 
a live faith in an Infinite Person who is 
corporate with our lives, from whom we 
have sprung, in whom we live, as far as 
we spiritually do live, who needs us as 
we need him, and who is sharing with 



io8 DOUBLE SEARCH 






us the travail and the tragedy as well as 
the glory and the joy of bringing forth 
sons of God. 

In such a kingdom — an organic fel- 
lowship of interrelated persons — prayer 
is as normal an activity as gravitation 
is in a world of matter. Personal spirits 
experience spiritual gravitation, soul 
reaches after soul, hearts draw toward 
each other. We are no longer in the net 
of blind fate, in the realm of impersonal 
force, we are in a love-system where the 
aspiration of one member heightens the 
entire group, and the need of one — even 
the least — draws upon the resources of 
the whole — even the Infinite. We are 
in actual Divine-human fellowship. 

The only obstacle to effectual praying, 
in this world of spiritual fellowship, 
would be individual selfishness. To 



PRAYER 109 

want to get just for one's own self, to 
ask for something which brings loss and 
injury to others, would be to sever one's 
self from the source of blessings, and to 
lose not only the thing sought but to 
lose, as well, one's very self. 

This principle is true anywhere, even 
in ordinary human friendship. It is 
true too, in art and in music. The artist 
may not force some personal caprice into 
his creation. He must make himself 
the organ of a universal reality which 
is beautiful not simply for this man or 
that, but for man as man. If there is, 
as I believe, an inner kingdom of spirit, 
a kingdom of love and fellowship, then 
it is a fact that a tiny being like one of 
us can impress and influence the Divine 
Heart, and we can make our personal 
contribution to the Will of the universe, 



no DOUBLE SEARCH 

but we can do it only by wanting what 
everybody can share and by seeking 
blessings which have a universal impli- 
cation. 

So far as prayer is real fellowship, it 
gives as well as receives. The person 
who wants to receive God must first 
bring himself. If He misses us, we miss 
Him. He is Spirit, and consequently 
He is found only through true and genu- 
ine spiritual activity. In this corre- 
spondence of fellowship there is no more 
11 violation of natural law" than there 
is in love wherever it appears. Love is 
itself the principle of the spiritual uni- 
verse, as gravitation is of the physical; 
and as in the gravitate system the earth 
rises to meet the ball of the child, with- 
out breaking any law, so God comes to 
meet and to heighten the life of anyone 



PRAYER in 

who stretches up toward Him in appre- 
ciation, and there is joy above as well as 
below. 

All that I have said, and much more, 
gets vivid illustration in the " Lord's 
prayer," which Christians have taken as 
a model form, though they have not al- 
ways penetrated its spirit. It is in every 
line a prayer of fellowship and co-opera- 
tion. It is a perfect illustration of the 
social nature of prayer. The co-opera- 
tion and fellowship are not here con- 
fined, and they never are except in the 
lower stages, to the inward communion 
of an individual and his God. There 
is no / or me or mine in the whole 
prayer. The person who prays spiritu- 
ally is enmeshed in a living group and 
the reality of his vital union with per- 
sons like himself clarifies his vision of 



ii2 DOUBLE SEARCH 

that deeper Reality to whom he prays. 
Divine Fatherhood and human brother- 
hood are born together. To say Father 
to God involves saying " brother " to 
one's fellows, and the ground swell of 
either relationship naturally carries the 
other with it, for no one can largely 
realize the significance of brotherly love 
without going to Him in whom love is 
completed. 

" Hallowed be thy name " is often 
taken in a very feeble sense to mean 
" keep us from using thy name in vain," 
or it is thought of as synonymous with 
the easy and meaningless platitude, 
11 Let thy name be holy." It is in reality 
a heart-cry for a full appreciation of the 
meaning of the Divine name, i. e., the 
Divine character. It is an uprising of 
the soul to an apprehension of the holi- 



PRAYER 113 

ness of God and the fullness of His life 
that the soul may return to its tasks with 
a sense of infinite resources and under 
the sway of a vision of the true ideal. 
This Lord's prayer begins with a word 
of intimate relationship and social union 
— " Our Father." It then goes out be- 
yond the familiar boundaries of experi- 
ence to feel the infinite sweep of God's 
completeness and perfectness and to be- 
come penetrated with solemn awe and 
reverence which fit such companionship, 
— " Our Father of the holy name." 

This is the prelude. The true melody 
of prayer, if I may say so, begins with 
the positive facing of the task of life: — 
11 Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done 
on earth as it is in heaven." Here again 
we have the loftiest Fellowship. The 
person who prays this way is linked with 

8 



ii4 DOUBLE SEARCH 

God in one mighty spiritual whole. The 
last vestige of atomic selfishness is 
washed out. There are those who say 
these words of prayer with folded hands 
and closed eyes, and then expect the de- 
sired kingdom to come by miracle; they 
suppose that if the request is made often 
enough a millennium age will drop out 
of the skies. Ah, no ! If God is Spirit 
and man is meant to be spiritual, such a 
millennium is a sheer impossibility. 
This prayer involves the most strenuous 
life that ever was lived. To pray seri- 
ously for the coming of the kingdom of 
heaven means to contribute to its com- 
ing. It has come in any life which is 
completely under the sway of the holy 
Will and which is consecrated to the task 
of making that holy Will prevail in soci- 



PRAYER 115 

ety. It is no " far off Divine event." 
It is always coming. 

" For an ye heard a music, like enow 
They are building still, seeing the city 

is built 
To music, therefore never built at all 
And therefore built forever." 

In a plain word, it is the total task of 
humanity through the ages. It is the 
embodiment in a temporal order of the 
eternal purpose. It is the weaving in 
concrete figure and color of the Divine 
pattern. It is the slow and somewhat 
painful work of making an actual Divine 
society out of this rather stubborn and 
unpromising potential material. But it 
is our main business, and this prayer is 
the girding of the loins for the sublime 
task of helping God make His world. 



n6 DOUBLE SEARCH 

11 Man as yet is being made, and e'er the 

crowning age of ages, 
Shall not aeon after aeon pass and touch 

him into shape? 
All about him shadow still, but, while 

the races flower and fade, 
Prophet eyes may catch a glory, slowly 

gaining on the shade, 
Till the people all are one and all their 

voices blend in a choric 
Hallelujah to the Maker, ' It is finished; 

man is made/ M 

Fellow laborers with God in truth we 
are. Prayer ends in labor and labor 
ends in prayer. But it is not a cry for 
miracle. It is an inward effort at co- 
operation. 

There is a beautiful mingling of the 
great and the little, the cosmic and the 



PRAYER 117 

personal. The universal sweep of Di- 
vine ends does not swallow up, or miss, 
the needs of the concrete individual. 
While the spiritual universe is building, 
men must have daily bread and they 
must constantly face the actual present 
with its routine and monotony. Here 
again prayer is no miraculous method of 
turning stones into bread. It is no easy 
substitute for toil. It is the joyous in- 
sight that in the avenues of daily toil, 
God and man are co-operating and that 
in very truth the bread for the day is 
as much God given as it is won by 
the sweat of brow. The recently dis- 
covered " saying of Jesus M best inter- 
prets this prayer. " Wherever any man 
raises a stone or splits wood, there am 
I." He consecrates honest toil. 

Next we come to the profound word 



n8 DOUBLE SEARCH 

which shows how completely our lives 
are bound together in organic union, 
above and below: " Forgive us as we 
forgive." What a solemn thing to say. 
Dare we pray it! And yet few words 
have ever so truly revealed the nature 
of prayer. It is, one sees, no easy, lazy 
way to blessings. Once more, it is co- 
operation. " Forgiveness is not a gift 
which can fall upon us from the skies, 
in return for a capricious request. The 
blessing depends on us as much as it 
does on God. A cold, hard, unforgiv- 
ing heart can no more be forgiven than a 
lazy, slipshod student can have knowl- 
edge given to him. Like all spiritual 
things, forgiveness can come only when 
there is a person who appreciates its 
worth and meaning. The deep cry for 
forgiveness must rise out of a forgiving 



PRAYER 119 

spirit It is always more than a trans- 
action, an event. It is an inward condi- 
tion of the personal life, and the soul 
that feels what it means to love and for- 
give is so bound into the whole divine 
order that love and forgiveness come in 
as naturally as light goes through the 
open casement, or the tide into an inlet. 
The next word is surely to be thought 
of as a human cry: " Take us not into 
testing." It is the natural shrinking of 
the tender, sensitive soul, and it is the 
right attitude. Most of us know by 
hard experience that trial, proving, test- 
ing, yes, even actual temptation, have a 
marvelous ministry. No saint is made 
in the level plain, where the waters are 
still and the pastures green. 



120 DOUBLE SEARCH 

44 Never on custom's oiled grooves 
The world to a higher level moves, 
But grates and grinds with friction 

hard 
On granite boulder and flinty shard. 
The heart must bleed before it feels, 
The pool be troubled before it heals." 

All this we know. We know that the 
stern battle makes the veteran. But this 
prayer is the childlike cry, the shrinking 
fear, which are always safer than the 
bold dash, the impetuous plunge. It is 
the utterance of an instinctive wish to 
keep where safety lies, and, humanly 
speaking, it is right, though, in a world 
whose highest fruit is character, we may 
expect that bitter cups and hard bap- 
tisms will be a part of our experience. 
Like all that has gone before, it is an 



PRAYER 121 

effort at cooperation. It is a sincere as- 
piration for green pastures and still 
waters joined with a readiness to be fed 
at the table in presence of the enemy, if 
need be, readiness for the perilous edge 
of conflict, for " high strife and glorious 
hazard." 

Last of all there rises the cry for de- 
liverance from the power of evil. Once 
more we realize that this is not an oc- 
casion for magical interference, no call 
for a fiery dart out of the sky to pierce 
a black demon who is pushing us into 
sin. The drama is an inward one and 
the enemy, called of many names, is a 
part of our own self. Each soul has 
its own struggle with the immemorial 
tug of brute inheritance — the sag of 
lower nature. 



122 DOUBLE SEARCH 

11 When the fight begins within himself, 
A man's worth something. God 
stoops o'er his head, 
Satan looks up between his feet — both 

tug — 
He's left, himself, i' the middle: The 
soul wakes 
And grows." 

But here supremely appears our prin- 
ciple of co-operation. Prayer for deliv- 
erance from evil cannot end on the lips. 
There is no conquest of the flesh, no 
killing out of ape and tiger, until we our- 
selves catch at God's skirts and rise to 
live for the Spirit and by the Spirit. 
There is no deliverance till the soul says, 
" I will be free " and God and man tug 
on the same side. Wherever any citadel 
of evil is battered God and man are 



PRAYER 123 

there together. God finds a human or- 
gan and man draws on the inexhaustible 
resources of God. 

Prayer, whether it be the lisp of a 
little child, or the wrestling of some 
great soul in desperate contest with the 
coils of habit or the evil customs of his 
generation is a testimony to a divine- 
human fellowship. In hours of crisis 
the soul feels for its Companion, by a 
natural gravitation, as the brook feels 
for the ocean. In times of joy and 
strength, it reaches out to its source of 
Life, as the plant does to the sun. And 
when it has learned the language of 
spiritual communion and knows its 
Father, praying refreshes it as the greet- 
ing of a friend refreshes one in a for- 
eign land. We ought not to expect that 
prayer, of the true and lofty sort, could 



i2 4 DOUBLE SEARCH 

be attained by easy steps. It involves 
appreciation of God and co-operation 
with Him. One comes not to it in a 
day. Even human friendship is a great 
attainment. It calls for sacrifice of pri- 
vate wishes and for adjustment to the 
purposes of another life. One cannot be 
an artist or a musician without patient 
labor to make oneself an organ of the 
reality which he fain would express. He 
must bring himself by slow stages to a 
height of appreciation. Prayer is the 
highest human function. It is the utter- 
ance of an infinite friendship, the expres- 
sion of our appreciation of that complete 
and perfect Person whom our soul has 
found. " Lord, teach us how to pray." 



The United States a 
Christian Nation. 

BY 

HON. DAVID J. BREWER, 

Associate Justice of the Supreme Court United States. 
Haverford College Library Lectures, 1905. 



In this book the Distinguished Christian Jurist has 
discussed three important topics: 

First. "THE UNITED STATES A 
CHRISTIAN NATION, M in which he shows 
why our Republic should be so classified, basing 
his argument upon the Decisions of the Supreme 
Court, Colonial Charters, Constitution of the 
United States, and National and State Legislation. 

Second. "OUR DUTY AS CITIZENS." 
A strong plea for Business Honesty and Integrity, 
for Liberty and the Rights of Ma/i, for Education, 
for Peace and Temperance. 

Third. "THE PROMISE AND POSSI- 
BILITIES OF THE FUTURE." An earnest 
and eloquent exhortation to the young men of 
America to temper their devotion to country with 
fidelity to the teachings of the Gospel. 

Issued October 1, 1905. 

1 2mo. 1 00 pp. Price, postpaid, $ 1 .00. 



THE JOHN C. WINSTON CO. 

PHILADELPHIA. PA. 



SOCIAL LAW IN THE 

SPIRITUAL WORLD 

Studies in Human and Divine Inter-Relationship 

BY 

Rufus M. Jones, A.M., I^itt. D. 

Professor of Philosophy in Haverford College^ Pa, 

This is a fresh interpretation of the deep- 
est problems of life. It discusses the most 
interesting phases of recent psychological in- 
vestigation into spiritual subjects. 
1 Professor Jones offers here a series of studies 
on the nature and meaning of Personality. 
He is at home in modern psychology and tells 
it effectively for his purpose in freedom from 
technicalities. ■ ' — The Outlook. 
"The author has written the twelve chapters 
of this book dealing with such subjects as The 
Meaning of Personality, The Realization of 
Persons, The Sub-Conscious Life, The Inner 
Light, etc., etc., with an aim to show through 
Psychology, as Drummond showed through 
Biology, that life can be unified from top to 
bottom." — Christian Work and the Evan- 
gelist. 

"The author bears a unique equipment for 
the task, having stndied Philosophy at Harvard 
under Royce and Palmer, and acquired the art 
of presenting it to untrained thinkers in his 
capacity of Professor of Philosophy at Haver- 
ford College."— Britis h Friend. 

12mo. 272 pages. Extra Vellum Cloth, 

Gilt Top, Uncut Edges. Price $ 1 .25 

Net (Postage 10 Cents). 

THE JOHN G WINSTON COMPANY 

PHILADELPHIA, PA. 



A History 



OF 



The Society of Friends 
in America 

BY 

ALLEN C. THOMAS, A.M. 

HAVERFORD COLLEGE 
AND 

RICHARD H. THOMAS, M.D. 

BALTIMORE, MD. 



NEW AND REVISED EDITION, 1905 

Brought down to date and including valu- 
able statistics and information in regard to 
the Society of Friends in America. 



" A work on ' The History of the Society 
of Friends in America/ which is likely for 
many days to be a standard text-book on the 
subject.' ' — The London Friend. 

M We have read it with interest. It gives 
evidence of much research and of a disposi- 
tion to observe the impartiality of faithful 
historians."— r£* Friend, Philadelphia. 



12 mo. Cloth. Price. $1.00 Net 
( Postage, 1 5 Cents ) 



THE JOHN C. WINSTON CO. 

PHILADELPHIA. PA. 



1*>o 



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